Believable Intelligent Agents

Traditionally, virtual characters were mainly designed using a computer graphics approach

in which visual realism is the ultimate goal. Most researchers looked at believability from

the visual perspective such as (Aubel & Thalmann, 2000). Some other researchers worked on

the idea that believability depends more on the characters’ ability to show inner feelings and

emotions such as (Blumberg and Galyean, 1995). Some researchers also improved

believability by adding additional motions such as periodic noise functions (Perlin, 1995).

However, all these approaches are still limited to the character’s visual appearance.

We think that constructing a believable intelligent character requires a trans-disciplinary

approach including not only technological advances in computer graphics and animation,

artificial intelligence and artificial life, etc., but also the knowledge and experience from

other experts such as novel writers and scenarists. In addition, we argue that the

believability of an artificial character is not related to the level of realism of its main features,

but rather to the equilibrium between all the features that compose the character. In other

words, the character must be well-balanced.

6 Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agents